Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization Book

In this book Stephen Kotkin does what might seem impossible. He immerses the reader in the complete world of a Stalinist boomtown in the 1930s. The people in the new city of Magnitogorsk do not come off as Bolshevik caricatures or Soviet myrmidons, but as real humans facing normal and abnormal problems with all the intelligence and grace they can muster. Taking advantage of the full range of published and unpublished Soviet sources, he details what everyday life looked like to people living under one of the most oppressive dictatorships known to man.

Kotkin does not dismiss the horrors of Stalinism, but he does argue with the "totalitarian" interpretation of it, since he shows the innumerable ways individuals escaped its totalizing grasp. For instance, he shows how much of the economy was really a "shadow" economy, where purloined factory parts or cloth went to either independently fulfill the impossible plans of Moscow or into private production that was resold in the official "markets" or even by door-to-door peddling. He shows that despite the attempts by famed German planner Ernst May to design a perfect new "linear town," the city arose haphazardly wherever workers could pitch tents or mud huts. Despite the harsh censorship, the Magnitgorsk Worker newspaper catalogued many of the failures of local elites, including the inability of the Steel Factories KPU living quarters unit to maintain their new barracks, the crime rampant in the "Convict Labor Colony," mistakes in completing the city blast furnace and so on. In a way, pushing a recalcitrant Communist system involved constant criticism which is a cornucopia for a researcher. Of course such criticism was usually leveled at those already pushed out of the system or the Party.

The book also offers the best description I've read of the 1937 Terror. Kotkin shows that the division between an elite Communist Party, whose job was to maintain ideological uniformity and place personnel in appropriate "nomenklatura" positions, and an actual state system, which did the work of running factories and homes and police and so on, led to irreconcilable conflicts. From 1933 onwards the Party engaged in numerous internal "purges" and "verification" campaigns which aimed to expel corrupt party officials or merely those with a false "worker" pedigree, and which spread to failures in state production and soon involved the NKVD (the "state" system which tended to enforce party dictates). Gradually, internal party purges ate up the entire country and led to a classic witch-hunt atmosphere.

By detailing everything from the shrine-like "Red Corners" in the city barracks to the Magnit Cinema (showing movies such as "Party Card" and of course Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times") to the craze over "French Wrestling" at the local circus, Kotkin enriches our view of life and politics in an otherworldly time and place. It's hard to forget.